On Sat, Feb 26, 2000 at 02:20:46AM -0800, Ulf Carlsson wrote:
> > The situation for userland is different and much more complex. GNU libc and
> > other packages do heavily rely on GNU ld's features. Add that GNU ld is
> > evolving. That makes using anything but GNU ld a no go for userspace.
>
> I was talking to Ralf earlier and I mentioned that I thought SGI was going to
> use the MIPS Pro compiler to compile the Linux that will run on the IA-64 SN1
> machines. I really don't know what's happening with the MIPS Pro compiler
> nowadays, I've only heard rumours from here and there. If the MIPS Pro
> compiler is going to be used to compile Linux I assume that the GNU specific
> features required to compile the GNU libc, such as symbol versioning, will be
> added, and we can use the features for MIPS as well as IA-64. Does anyone
> know whether the MIPS Pro compiler for IA-64 will be open sourced or not?
In that context it may make sense to consider compiler, assembler and
linker as related but not directly dependent parts.
As said GNU ld and binutils are really insane pieces of code. Expressing
it with Alan Cox's words: ``and yes bfd hacking is like doing sendmail
configs blind with a belgian keyboard''. And yes, bfd is indeed the
abreviation for Big Fucking Deal. The alternative expansion Binary File
Descriptor library was created later on ...
I would really, really hate if we'd use a different assembler and linker
than all the others Linux architectures. It would still leave us with
with a broken libbfd which various tools are linked against. The most
important one of these is GDB and GDB functionality on IRIX already
suffers a good bit from the brokenness of libbfd on MIPS. I just say
N32 and 64 ABIs.
As mentioned before people at Cygnus have considered replacing GNU ld
years ago. Most important to drop everything but ELF support for a
ld replacement. With that happening and a new ld going into binutils
libbfd still wouldn't be eleminated. But large parts of it's
functionality could be eleminated, the complexity by reduced dramatically.
Result: only winners, at least among the ELF users. So after some
brain storming I think we should try to convince the other architectures
that GNU ld is really overdue to be replaced. Probbly little convincing
required. What we get is hopefully some linker that is maintainable for
us again.
Ralf
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